5:06pm January 9, 2014

“That both Mitt Romney and Phil Robertson have and love black grandbabies should remind us that racism is not primarily about individual attitudes. White folks can love individual black people and still build a world that is inhospitable to black folks. In fact, individual and exceptional black achievers are necessary to maintain the lie of racial progress. Their presence has very little to do with systemic change, though.”

—

Brittney Cooper, White Supremacy Wins Again: Melissa Harris Perry and the Racial False Equivalence (via checkprivilege)

Even really really really flagrant individual racism doesn’t mean a person can’t love individual PoC.

As in.

I know someone who really really liked a very small number of individual black people.

However, she referred to all other black people with the n-word and routinely said things like “I hate [n-word]s” and talked in terms of extreme stereotypes of the sort that most white people won’t do even if they’re fairly bigoted.

I remember her telling me she didn’t like this one black woman, and she said “And it wasn’t even because of her race!”

She then explained to me that there’s a difference between black people and n-words, because n-words are the black people you hate and black people are the black peopl you like.

She, needless to say, wasn’t popular even in white circles due to her extreme, blatant bigotry against just about every oppressed group of people including ones she belonged to. Like, most people who had all the standard prejudices that came with their form of privilege still found her impossible to stand.

And she thought that liking a few black people meant she wasn’t racist, because she only called the BAD or STUPID (in her terms, anyway) ones the n-word. She also called another woman with a developmental disability a motherfucking hunchbacked r-word. When I told her off for that, she said “I know those words hurt, but I was trying to hurt her so it’s okay.” She would rant about how racism was evil, with no hint of irony. When kicked out of places for being flagrantly bigoted against people of other races, she would whine about how nobody accepted her as she really was.

I never ever remember her mentioning a comedy movie that didn’t depend on flagrant racism for its “humor”.

She didn’t even try to hide her racist beliefs.

And even someone like her could have PoC friends, although I don’t know how they stood her. (I never knew any of them so I never had the chance to warn them or ask them about it.)

So. Yeah.

Notes: